This is a brief passage from Lucretius’s De Rerum Natura, often translated as The Way of Things. This version was translated by the brilliant American poet and translator Rolfe Humphries (1894–1969). Titus Lucretius Carus (99–55 BC) was a Roman philosopher and poet who felt that man’s unhappiness largely results from fear of the gods and our unknown fate in the afterlife. He was greatly influenced by Democritus’s theory of atoms and was an exponent of the Epicurean worldview that man seeks happiness above all else. De Rerum Natura suggests that religion is at the root of human anguish and, in this provocative passage, that the universe is boundless and unending and that the planet Earth and our own species are not by any means unique, for there are certainly many other planetary worlds. De Rerum Natura is a poem of enormous scope and intellectual depth. Almost nothing is known of Lucretius’s life.